


The Mars Observer in Ventilating Descent

by cathedraltunes



Series: Photographs Taken From the Atmosphere of an Alien Planet [1]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Everybody Lives, Gen, Grief, M/M, Missing Scene, POV Alternating, Post-Canon, Racism, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:09:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26808673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cathedraltunes/pseuds/cathedraltunes
Summary: The night before the Denbroughs moved out of Maine and Bill forgot all about Georgie, Bill rode Silver to the Hanlon farm.
Relationships: Bill Denbrough/Mike Hanlon
Series: Photographs Taken From the Atmosphere of an Alien Planet [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1969876
Comments: 5
Kudos: 42





	The Mars Observer in Ventilating Descent

**Author's Note:**

  * For [deadlight_s (scamsHan)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scamsHan/gifts).



> This is dedicated to Scams, one of the dearest and kindest and most tenacious people I know. Scams, I am so grateful and so happy to have known you these six years. You are a powerhouse of a writer, a kind and giving friend, hilarious as though a default and brilliant by very nature. 
> 
> The racism tag is for discussion of racism in Derry and, implicitly, the USA. Plus Bill's white guilt.

The night before the Denbroughs moved out of Maine and Bill forgot all about Georgie, Bill rode Silver to the Hanlon farm. That was the summer of ’93, the year the Toronto Blue Jays took the World Series with a three man home run, the year of the World Trade Center bombing and the Waco stand-off, the year of Clinton’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. NASA lost contact with the Mars Observer in August, another cold-minded child that burned up in the long night of space, transmitting up to the hour of its death still images of Jupiter vast and grey with its unseeing eye. 

That was the year Mike’s grandmother passed. They held the funeral at the small black church in Derry. She was laid to rest forty miles outside Derry, in the neighboring township of Atonement where in days of enforced segregation all black Derry residents had to bury their dead. Derry Memorial Grounds Cemetery welcomed all dead but the Hanlons preferred tradition. Less likely the white boys of Derry would knock a marker over ‘cause it had Hanlon engraved into the sandstone.

Bill went to the funeral. Richie, too, and Ben who moved out the week after with his mom, but Sonia Kaspbrak had kept Eddie home on account of his lingering pneumonia. Bill’s mother drove him. She remarked that it was kind of him to attend the service, but she wouldn’t drive him to the burial, and he was too embarrassed to ask Mike’s grandda if he could ride in the pick-up with them. It wasn’t his grandmother. He felt his whiteness in his church suit through the whole of it. 

Like he was an alien from far off Andromeda clad in spandex and a rubber mask that had disembarked his silver rocket and the people looking at him knew him for what he was: invader. He’d an idea of why his mother hadn’t wanted to take him to the burial and it was the sort of idea that made his jaw tighten up and his tongue go fat and clumsy; but he was too scared to say anything and so maybe in that way he wasn’t any better. 

So in June, about two months after the Hanlons had taken their trip to Atonement along with the rest of Derry’s small black community, after the sun had finally settled comfortable against the horizon with the sky gashed purple and virulent pink, Bill got on Silver and pumped as hard as he could for the farm.

Leroy Hanlon answered the door. Bill in his cargo shorts and his Nirvana tee straightened. Mike’s grandda’s eyes were clear and sharp-focused, he was a man who saw just about everything in the world to be seen, but there was around him a smell of malt rye. Leroy held the doorframe in one hand, his long thumb pressed to it, and he had the door grasped firm in the other hand.

“Denbrough,” said Leroy. 

“Good aft, afternoon, sir,” said Bill. “I was wondering if, uh, if, uh, Mike was around.”

He jerked his head: out back. “He’s in the pasture with the lambs. You hold here. I’ll get him his dinner. You can take it to him.”

Leroy was gone a time then brought Bill a hankie-wrapped bundle to take to Mike and another sandwich wrapped hasty-like in saran on top of that.

“You boys eat,” he said shortly. “Shirley always said you ate like horses. Guess that’s why we never raised ‘em.” He handed off a couple thermoses too, lemonade he said.

Bill walked the dirt path through the growing field and past the barn where the Hanlons did the meat work. The pasture was looped in with a tall white-painted fence, horizontal beams stacked a foot apart to the top so the sheep couldn’t slip out or the dogs slip in. 

Most of the flock had settled into their routine, grazing or lying in huge, tangled, stinking lumps on the ground in groups. They stared at him with placid, dark eyes. A pang stuck at Bill. He wouldn’t be here come shearing season to help with bagging the wool as he had the last couple years. Stan had liked to help with the shearing too, something about the process of sorting and weighing and tagging the bags of wool soothing to his mathematical mind.

Mike would laugh at them. Neither Bill nor Stan were allowed the shears, though Mike had graduated to them early. Family farm meant family education. He’d called them Chip and Dale for the chipmunks, a verdict Stan found deeply funny. Bill had sweated resent at it till late one night tossing bags he accidentally knocked Mike in the head with one and Mike had laughed and grabbed the bag up and thrown it right back at Bill so hard it knocked Bill flat on his ass.

It was Chip who alerted Mike, Chip the old border collie that followed Mike about the farm like a tired, worn-foot shadow. Mike sat up and turned; that was when Bill caught sight of him.

“Hey, Bill,” said Mike. “What d’you got there?”

“Dinner, d-dumbass,” said Bill.

“Chip, get ‘im,” Mike said. “Tear this honky’s seat off.”

Chip yawned and made a querulous sound and laid his long snout even with Mike’s leg to sleep some more. Grinning, Bill stepped around some of the sheep and crouched down next to Mike. He’d a lamb in his lap, one of the month olds, and from the direction of the curling coat he’d been carding his fingers through its new wool for a while.

They divvied up the dinner. Mike popped the lid off his thermos with pleasure. The lamb stirred and made soft bleating. A lumbering shadow of a ewe stood up and called to the lamb. Shaking, struggling to its feet from Mike’s lap, the lamb trotted to her with Chip giving it a nudge on the ass for momentum.

“Don’t knock her over,” Mike told Chip. “She’s just a baby.” But he gave Chip’s nose a firm, fast rubbing that left Chip pleased, happy to rest his head on Mike’s warm, emptied lap.

Bill ate his sandwich. It was a Leroy joint all right, ham and turkey plus a slice of lettuce and a couple strips of bacon left over from the morning. The bacon crunched violently in his mouth. Peanut butter for flavor, tomato for juice.

So simple a thing to sit in silence with Mike. After ’89 Bill had got in the habit of biking as far as he could out of Derry. Then he’d just biked to the farm. Leroy and Shirley put him to work in the summer. Some days in that heat he and Mike were so tired they didn’t have enough gumption left over to say word one to each other. They’d just sit by each other, their shirts off, sticky with sweat, a little taller and little bigger each summer, sharing their lunches and looking across the pasture or maybe the field toward the trees off in the distance or maybe at the blue sky. 

It had to with being a Loser, maybe, that bond that was there no matter what else you did or said, something cut into them by the thing that lived under Derry. The thing they’d killed. 

“What’re you doing here, Bill?”

Mike’s voice broke through the dark. The sun had gone out. A full pale moon and her attending court of stars pocked the night. Bill felt intimately the heat Mike put out. His body knew to expect Mike on his left. He thought Mike’s body expected Bill on the right.

“I wuh-wanted to say good-bye.” He dug into one of the deeper pockets of his shorts, feeling for the flashlight.

“We said good-bye earlier today,” said Mike. “You were there or don’t you remember?”

They knew by then that the forgetting would come. Beverly’s phone calls trickled off. Stan didn’t write. Ben wrote prodigiously for a month then sent a couple postcards then nothing at all.

“I don’t mean to forg-get,” said Bill quietly. “I’m gggonna try, Mike.” He took a breath to steady. “I’m gonna try and remember. Here. I wanted to give you this.”

He’d found the flashlight and the creased paperback in the same pocket. Flicking on the light, he handed both to Mike. 

Mike studied the book. He rubbed his thumb over the title: _In the Heat of the Night_ , then the author’s name: John Ball.

“Black detective, huh,” said Mike. He glanced at Bill. In the dark, with the flashlight pointed forward, his face was as much a mystery as Bill’s to him. “We can’t do book club when you’re gone, Bill.”

“No, that’s my pla-plan,” Bill forged through. “I’m … gonna read the same books you read. And we’ll write about ‘em to each other. And that way I won’t forg-get you.” In the dark, he flushed. In the dark, Mike couldn’t see. “Or Derry. Or the promise.” His fingers curled instinctively over his scarred palm.

Mike was quiet again looking at the book, and then he sighed and he turned his head away and he said almost as if to Chip, “It won’t matter. You’ll forget because that’s how Derry survives.”

“I’m not gonna forget,” Bill said loudly. “I’m not gonna forget that you st-stayed.”

He turned fiercely on Bill. Close enough now he’d come that the moonlight made blue silver of his face, deep pools of his eyes.

“You think if anybody ever remembered anything about Derry that Derry would still be here? They would’ve burned this town to the ground. There wouldn’t be a fucking Derry if people remembered it. But they want to forget so they forget ‘cause that’s what people do, Bill. You know people, Bill! You’ve seen them. They forget in the cities too. They forget everywhere. That’s why I have to stay, Bill, because I have to _remember_.”

“You don’t have to stuh, stay,” Bill said. “You can leave too.”

“Somebody’s gotta stay.”

“Why does it have to be you?”

Mike looked at him. He was fathomless. That was Mike. Bill stared at him, silver-lined and electric with grief and rage.

“Because of the _farm_ ,” said Mike. “Your family moved here. All of you, your families moved here, except for Bev. I have to stay because Derry’s in me. I’m in the soil.”

“Fuck the soil! Fuck Derry! You don’t owe Derry anything.”

“Georgie’s here too,” Mike said. “Georgie’s in Derry, too.”

His jaw clenching, Bill stood up as though to storm away; then he only stood there flexing his hands. 

He said, “It isn’t right.”

Mike said, “It’s never been right,” the only black kid in all of Derry. All the other black kids had left, leaving behind grandmothers and grandfathers, aunties and uncles, older family that Derry had got its fingers in.

So Bill sat down again, quiet and heavy, his fingers braced against the soil.

“Thanks for the book,” said Mike. “I’ll write you what I think.”

“Okay,” said Bill. “I’ll write you what I think, too.”

They’d started trading books that first summer the two of them worked the farm together. Old science fiction books that Bill bought a dime a piece at the big used bookstore in Haven, then the back issues of Locus and Amazing Stories and Fantasy & Science Fiction Mike found in the attic with the rest of his mom’s forgotten estate. Then crime novels and detective magazines, then ragged issues of EC Comics and Strange Tales. 

The books and comic books and short stories and essays had made fires in Bill’s brain, lit his mind with what-ifs and how-comes. To Mike, who had confessed it once to Bill, they were like escapes. Like doors that opened onto other worlds. 

“If you left,” said Bill at last. “Where would you go?”

Mike turned the flashlight off and handed it to Bill. He kept the book. 

“The stars,” Mike said. “Any one of ‘em. There have to be other planets out there. Planets like Earth. And I could go there and I’d take my whole family and I’d take the Losers and there wouldn’t be any Henry Bowers or fucking sewer clowns. And then,” he said, and Bill turning somewhat could nearly rest his chin on Mike’s shoulder, “I’d go to another one. And another one after that.”

“If you wuh-wanted,” said Bill softly. “I’d go with you.”

Mike laughed a little. There wasn’t much joy to it. He too shifted under the stars so that he faced Bill.

“It’s not about wanting,” said Mike. His breath moved warmly across Bill’s nose, his lips. “I don’t think we ever get what we want.”

“That’s not right,” said Bill. “That isn’t fair. You deserve— You deserve more than Duh-Derry,” and maybe it wasn’t right or fair of Bill to lean in and kiss Mike then but he did it anyway. And after a moment, Mike sighed out through his nose and kissed Bill back there in the grass with the smell of sheep around them and the stars cold alien eyes and Chip grumbling in his sleep. They kissed for a while in the grass, some timeless stretch.

Then they got up and Mike whistled to Chip, and Mike went home and Bill went away.


End file.
